Strangers with the Same Dream Page 23

  “Obviously,” one of the twins said.

  He inserted an index finger under his red suspender and smirked at her.

  Ruth looked to Hannah, questioning—she could not interpret the man’s unkindness. It was not in her realm of reference.

  Hannah took a deep breath. The smell of clover in the sun.

  The second twin gave his brother a slantwise look, and said to Ruth, gently, “You’re a smart girl. Have you seen twins before?”

  “Horses only,” she said. She stood on her tiptoes and peered at his face. “What happened to your lips?” she asked.

  Hannah winced, but the German laughed. “Nothing happened. They’re freckles!”

  “On your lips?”

  “Funny,” he said, “isn’t it.”

  He ruffled Ruth’s hair, which she submitted to happily. He extended his hand. “I’m Samuel. And my brother is Selig.”

  His brother looked at the interaction without bothering to conceal his disdain, his forehead wrinkled and his marked lips puckered. Then he turned to leave.

  “I’m Ruth,” Ruth said, oblivious to Selig’s retreating back. She shook Samuel’s hand, happy to have been taken as a person of consequence.

  Samuel was larger than his brother, slightly, and had a higher forehead and larger ears.

  “He doesn’t speak very much Hebrew,” Samuel said of Selig, now that he was gone, and as though this could somehow account for his rudeness.

  “I speak only Hebrew,” Ruth said proudly, and Samuel raised his eyebrows to show he was impressed.

  “You’ve been in Eretz Yisrael for a long time,” he said.

  “For my whole life,” Ruth said. She held up Salam so Samuel could see. “My doll speaks Hebrew and Arabic,” she said.

  She arranged the headscarf so it covered the doll’s forehead.

  “But mostly Arabic,” she said. “Because she was Sakina’s.” She passed gas loudly, and giggled. “You can button her headscarf into a kippah,” she said, and started to demonstrate.

  “Sorry,” Hannah said, trying to manoeuvre her daughter out of the way so Samuel could leave, but he said, “For what?” and moved to take Ruth’s hand.

  “Ma shlomech?” he said.

  “Tov toda,” Ruth answered.

  The two of them sat down among the spread-out jumble of objects. Lye soap and red plastic jerry cans of gasoline. Hannah hesitated and then sat down too. It felt good not to move.

  “My brother experienced something very difficult,” Samuel said to Hannah right away, like he had been waiting to unburden himself; like he had spent so long—all his life—being attached to Selig, viewed in the same light, and he wanted to snip the cord that bound them in other people’s eyes. He had been waiting for someone to tell, and Hannah was there. Or so she thought. Later, she would wonder if it had been more calculated.

  Samuel was not looking at Hannah—in fact he was looking away—but she could sense from the rigidity of his body that he was waiting for an answer.

  “I understand,” she said.

  He nodded without lifting his eyes.

  “He was in a prison camp,” he said. “In Siberia.”

  Hannah made a noise of sympathy but she didn’t ask why; the reason was that he was a Jew. This was the truth that Eretz Yisrael was built to counter. A place where Jews could be safe, and not fear being carted away to a random jail cell at any moment.

  “Terrible things happened to him,” Samuel said.

  Ruth was arranging the items around them according to size, from largest to smallest—washtub followed by washboard followed by the horse-hair brushes and then thinner paint brushes—but now she looked up. Her cheeks were bright pink from the heat. “What terrible things?” she asked.

  Samuel looked to Hannah, apologetic.

  “It was cold,” Hannah said.

  “Was there snow?” Ruth asked.

  Samuel said, “And ice.”

  “I’ve never seen snow,” said Ruth.

  Hannah said, “It snowed once when you were a baby.”

  “In the winter the rain is freezing cold like ice,” Ruth conceded, as though preparing Samuel for something he could not now imagine in the heat. Then a look came over her face; she realized her mother had succeeded in distracting her. She turned to Samuel directly. “What happened to your brother in prison?”

  She ran a tin fork over the corrugated washboard, making Hannah grimace.

  Hannah could see that Samuel was a kind man, but a man who had no experience with children. “Sometimes people are unkind to Jews,” she said to Ruth. She stretched her legs out in front of her and pointed her toes.

  Ruth nodded, impatient. She knew this; she had known it always. “And also to Arabs,” she said, which had been another important part of the teachings in the Baby House.

  “Maybe they did things to his body that hurt him,” Hannah said.

  “Like Abba did to Sakina?”

  Samuel looked up sharply, his dark hair shining in the heat. None of the halutzim knew what had happened at the old place. Hannah and David had agreed to this covertly; there was no need to state it explicitly. It would make him look bad—it would make them all look bad—if the young pioneers knew they had been exiled.

  “Maybe they hit him,” Hannah said to Ruth. “Maybe he didn’t have enough food.” She wiped her face with the back of her arm.

  Ruth was interested now. “Hit him where?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, bubala.”

  “On his face?”

  “No,” Hannah lied.

  “On his tuchus?”

  Hannah imagined a matronly Bubbe in a Siberian prison putting grown men over her knee and whacking them with a wooden spoon. “Maybe,” she said.

  Samuel was examining his fingernail, a pink tinge on his pale cheeks.

  “Liora went to Yerushaly’im once, to learn about Maria Montessori,” Ruth said. “No spanking,” she added. “Children are human beings to whom respect is due.”

  She bit her lower lip with her teeth, but could not recall the rest of the quote. “I had brothers and sisters at the old place,” Ruth said to Samuel.

  “Which old place?”

  “Kinneret,” Hannah explained. “Where we came from.”

  But she knew that these new halutzim barely registered that anything had come before. They thought themselves to be the first Jews ever to settle in Eretz Yisrael.

  “They were other people’s children,” Hannah added. “The kids were raised together in the Baby House.”

  “How many children?” Samuel asked.

  “Six.”

  Hannah plucked a blade of grass and twirled it between her thumb and forefinger. “I did have another pregnancy,” she said, although as soon as the words escaped her, she could not believe she had said it.

  Ruth’s head snapped up.

  “Imma?” she asked.

  Hannah ignored her, but Ruth said, “You did?”

  How, Hannah thought, had she arrived at this dangerous subject? Talking with another interested adult; Samuel had a calmness to him. It was like they were a family on a Sunday picnic. Her guard was down.

  “Girls can wear a kippah too!” Ruth said now, forceful, repeating what Liora had taught her. She held up her rag doll and gazed at it with a look of such adoration that both of the adults laughed. Ruth lifted the small headscarf and buttoned it, completing the transformation.

  “That’s true,” Hannah said. “Why is that?”

  She was hoping to distract the girl, but Ruth said, “What other baby did you have?”

  “No other baby,” Hannah said. “Only you, bubala.”

  But Samuel, she knew, had understood. A pregnancy was not the same as a baby. There were many things that could happen to a pregnancy in this wild land, just as there were many things that could happen to a Jew in prison.

  Ruth pushed her face into her doll and inhaled deeply. Hannah hated to think what the doll must smell like, but it seemed to give Ruth some comfort. She
set Salam down in Samuel’s lap. “My sister,” she said, reverently, batting her eyelashes.

  Samuel smiled. “She’s lovely.”

  Ruth nodded, solemn. She stood up and grabbed a long poker meant for a fire and began scraping it around the inside of the washtub. She threw the poker into the tub, where it made a terrible clang like metals doors closing. She tried to climb inside the tub, and the toe of her sandal caught on the rim and Samuel leapt forward to stop her from falling chin-first onto the metal surface.

  “Thank you,” Hannah said. Her hand on her heart.

  “You’re welcome,” Samuel said. And as he looked at her, Hannah saw that he knew; not everything, but he knew enough.

  —

  Later, when she was bleeding again, she went to see Ida. She carried the rags with less shame than when the girl had been a complete stranger, but it still embarrassed her to have to hand them over. She tried to think of a decoy, another reason she might have come. David had forgotten what he had promised, to find some girls to help her prepare Rosh Hashanah, and so Hannah asked Ida.

  “We need tablecloths,” she said. “For the meal. Or something to use as tablecloths. Just a bolt of fabric maybe?”

  Ida nodded.

  Hannah said, “We need a kiddish cup. Could you try to drum those things up?”

  Ida nodded again.

  “And pamotim,” Hannah said.

  Ida’s hands went to the sides of her face like she was being held up in a robbery at a bank.

  “I don’t have any candlesticks!” she almost shouted, her eyes wide as if Hannah had pointed a gun at her.

  Hannah took a half-step back.

  “I know, achoti,” Hannah tried to soothe her. “But could you look in the unpacked crates and see if you can find some?” She thought of the mess of things Samuel had been standing in earlier. Surely there must be some there.

  “Check with Samuel,” Hannah said.

  “The twin?”

  Hannah nodded.

  And Ida ran off before Hannah could say thank you.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE HALUTZIM HAD RAISED the tents and established the laundry, and now they began to work the fields. Hannah was grateful for it and resentful that she did not get to participate. All day and night Ruth was stuck to her like tea leaves, asking a thousand questions and refusing to put on her shoes. Wasn’t the promise of Eretz Yisrael that Hannah would not have to do this alone? That the halutzim would raise the children together, like a big bunch of grapes on the vine, ripe in the natural sunlight and growing into sweetness? The traditional family was a path to isolation, one they would leave to the capitalist cities of Europe and America. But Hannah found herself doing things she had never had to do: wiping her daughter’s behind and coaxing her to eat the last bit of porridge, which she left on her plate even though she complained constantly about being hungry.

  What I would have given to do those things. All of them. But of course, I never got my chance.

  Hannah fell asleep with the girl pressed to her side, and Ruth kicked her in the ribs and in the legs and she woke up with bruises in places she’d never had them before. A kink in her neck from contorting herself to make room for Ruth’s doll. All those years of longing for her child beside her, of imagining her cries from across the kibbutz, and now that she had an excuse—a reason—to sleep beside her daughter, she longed for freedom and space to move.

  And yet, contact with her girl worked its magic. She breathed in the smell of Ruth’s sweet warm skin in the morning when the hot sun pushed in at the sides of the canvas tent; she marvelled at the dust motes in her hair and the downy fuzz still on her upper arms and her earlobes. Hannah nibbled on her girl’s cheeks as if Ruth was made out of brisket and Ruth giggled wildly and tried to squirm away. Hannah had never had this intimacy before—the intimacy of waking in the same place as her child—and the loss of what she had missed crashed over her. A milky morning with her baby, bare skin on bare skin, both of them drifting back to sleep with the little mouth still fastened on the nipple. The short, pudgy legs carrying her daughter toward her when she’d fallen in the stable and skinned her knee on a nail; Ruth pulling up her mother’s shirt to get the milk. To get the love and comfort that was rightfully hers.

  Hannah rose to go to the outhouse. When she came back, Ruth had taken all the mosquito netting for herself.

  “Saba is sick,” the girl said. She stuffed the edge of the filthy doll into her mouth and sucked.

  “Don’t do that, Ruthie,” Hannah said.

  “Did you hear me?” the girl asked.

  “Yes,” Hannah said.

  “Sicker,” Ruth said. “More sicker than before.”

  She got off the pallet and untangled herself from the mosquito net. There was a small hole she had poked into the mud floor the previous day, so she could bury her blue marble and uncover it again. She resumed this game now as though she had never stopped it, as though no time had passed while she slept.

  “Are you sure?” Hannah asked.

  Ruth nodded. She picked up the dirty marble and inspected it; she put it in her mouth.

  “Ruthie! Spit it out!” Hannah said.

  Hannah put out her hand and Ruth spat the marble into her palm obediently.

  “I’m sure,” Ruth said.

  Next Ruth put out her palm and Hannah returned the marble. “Don’t eat it,” she said.

  “Touch but don’t eat?” Ruth asked.

  Hannah recognized this as a mantra Liora had used with the children when they were toddlers; when everything around them went straight into their mouths. Although, truth be told, the thinking on the kibbutz was that children could follow their instincts and no harm would come of it.

  Hannah thought of Sakina.

  Harm had come of that.

  “Can I come with you home?” Ruth asked.

  “Home where?” Hannah asked, although she knew what Ruth meant.

  “To Liora.”

  “To the old place?”

  Ruth nodded. “When Saba dies.”

  “What do you mean, bubala? Saba is alive.”

  Ruth shrugged. “I want to go home.”

  Her shoulder blades were so thin, thought Hannah. So fine and chiselled as to be wings.

  “We have to build Eretz Yisrael,” Hannah coaxed. “Remember what Liora said? It’s the most important job.”

  “I hate you,” Ruth said. She lifted up her blue marble and threw it, hard, at Hannah’s face.

  “Ouch! Why did you do that?”

  Sharp tears came to Hannah’s eyes. She rubbed at the spot the marble had made impact, her cheekbone below her right eye. “You could have blinded me!” she reprimanded, wiping her cheeks. “You could have killed me!”

  Only when she heard her own words did Hannah realize the effect they might have. Ruth’s eyes widened—and Hannah could see what was replaying in her daughter’s head as clearly as if it was a play the halutzim were putting on in the quarry in front of them. The lifting of the gun. The small girl’s body falling. The silence in the air after Sakina’s head hit the ground, and later, the adults—Arab and Jew—looking down together. The doll—the one that was now beside Ruth—thrown into the corner, her scarf pushed back off her face.

  “I’m sorry, Imma,” Ruth said, and started crying.

  Hannah wrapped her arms around her daughter. She rubbed her back but did not try to talk her out of her tears; they would come, they would exhaust themselves. To prevent them would just lead to more later.

  And comforting Ruth was comforting to Hannah too. The pleasure went in both directions. Maybe it was wrong to meet her own needs through the child’s more pressing ones, but it had been such a difficult journey here and she wanted the warmth of another human body. She wanted to be needed by someone, and Ruth needed her.

  “It’s okay, bubala,” she said, and held the girl against her chest while she cried.

  “Are you going to die?” Ruth looked up, mucous smeared on her cheek.

 
Hannah wiped it away with her thumb.

  “Why? Because of the marble?”

  Ruth nodded, her eyes wide.

  “Of course not!”

  Ruth sucked her lip. Her black curls hung over her face.

  “But Saba is.”

  Hannah was silent.

  “Saba!” she said more forcefully, as though Hannah was hard of hearing.

  “Everyone is going to die one day,” Hannah said, resigned.

  The great tiredness was creeping over her again; she wanted to lie down. She wanted to be left alone, even for a moment. To pull a pillow over her head and rest.

  “Not one day,” Ruth said.

  Hannah didn’t answer.

  “One day,” Ruth said. “Not eight days.”

  She had picked up Salam again; Hannah saw the upside-down semi-circles inked on the doll’s face that made it look like she was asleep. Lucky doll. Ruthie was now rubbing the doll’s fabric against her cheek, hard enough to chafe the skin.

  “What means the Hebrew? Who went around there?”

  What was Ruth talking about now? Hannah had no idea.

  “Salam went around there and so did all the children,” Ruth said, now narrating some private story to herself. “If you can’t see what’s coming, don’t say anything mean at all.”

  “Bubala,” Hannah said, absently. She rubbed at her elbow.

  “The berry is poison,” Ruth said, holding her blue marble to the doll’s mouth and making her eat it.

  —

  David was gone all day, and came to their tent in the evening. He crouched down and kissed his daughter on the top of her head. Hannah thought of the Angel Gabriel with his own mop of dark curls, his own ears that made the perfect ledge for a pencil to perch on.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” David said to his daughter.

  “Inshallah,” Ruth said. And, “Why do you have a gun?”

  “I’m on night guard,” David said.

  “I thought you were going to study?” Hannah asked.

  “I am. On night guard.”

  This had made sense in the old place, where they were so established that guard duty was merely a formality. But here, it seemed to Hannah, he could do better than reading Marx while the Arabs galloped past with their flaming torches.